He woke up at some point and was afraid that it was a school day or mama was leaving. Something like that. got him back to sleep quickly. At 6:40 we heard him yell upstairs. Carly went up but he was asleep. She came back down, then we heard the door a few minutes later. After a few minutes of being quiet, he suddenly started singing his “I found a nut, but I think it’s a butt” song that he had made up on Friday. He was really giggling. He was also tapping out the rhythm with his need and foot on the couch, so his rests were properly timed and in rhythm.
Carly took down the string in the kitchen after August ran in the kitchen and almost got clotheslined by it. A few minutes later he asked her, very nicely, to hang it back up, so we tried to figure out another option. She ended up hanging it from the front door to the always-closed door to the garage.
I took a shower and got ready to go. Left right at 7:20 and drove to the Interior and Population Ministry office in Netanya. I was line in the stairwell right when it opened at 8. Got my number at the visa office, V146, which didn’t sound too bad, and sat down and started reading The Last Bus to Wisdom, our book for book club this coming Friday. So far, I was only about 25% done. I left over 80% finished. The office only had 2 people dedicated to visa issues, so it moved very, very slowly. Finally, 3 hours and change later, I had my first meeting. At issue is the fact that I have a B-1 visa, which is a work visa, but the status of forces agreement says I can only work for U.S. military, the school – those sorts of things. It says I can’t otherwise work without “permission of the authorities” or some language like that. So the question is who do I get permission from.
They said they’d have to talk to a manager, and sent me back to wait. And wait and wait. I asked a couple more times, as the office cleared out (they close to people between 12 and 2:30), and eventually it was just me and an African couple – a son and mother, I think, waiting for a ‘manager’. Eventually, the manager took my passport and disappeared for awhile. She came back and made a copy of it. More waiting, and I got to see things get pretty heated between the officials and the woman that was waiting. Eventually, I was told that they were trying to check with the foreign ministry office, as this was the first time they’ve had a question like this. So, clearly the answer to my question was that I was asking the wrong people here. I sat down for another 15 minutes or so. The manager walked by again and asked me “Why are you waiting here?” I said because they were checking. She said no, they couldn’t do that today, and I asked well, then how are you planning on contacting me with an answer? She wrote down my number, and I got at least her first name and a phone number for her. She didn’t give me a foreign ministry contact though.
So I headed home. While I was gone they cooked energy balls and spaghetti. He was pretty helpful, or did a good job of playing on his own. He did break one of of our grey bowls, and helpfully used tape to fix it. He did one of his hanging magnet sculptures, and in the process dropped the horseshoe magnet twice. Both times they glued it with superglue. They did some Spirograph, and he played with the bowls and water outside. And he watched plenty of Ollie and Moon – he covered his ears for the one where they have to find a bathroom, and eventually Carly skipped that one for him.
When I got home, he was out in the garden doing some naked gardening. He was digging holes, and they had been transplanting plants. Back inside he wanted to watch Sarah and Duck. He got upset when we said no to that, and Carly took him upstairs. When he calmed down and they came down they were talking about death: “Well, it will. Everyone dies, right?…So when I die I don’t have powers.” “Well, I definitely know you can’t move, cuz all the things in your body are dead, right?” “…bones dead, muscles dead, digestive system dead, every system dead…” And he said he wouldn’t nurse for four days. He had turned a consequence (starting at just a few minutes) into a game, and kept increasing the time himself until he got to four days. But it turned out there was a loophole: “I’ll throw a chemical on you that makes you not remember one thing I don’t want you to remember.” So then he was throwing chemicals on us and we were pretending to forget.
Eventually, I got us going and he and I headed to Winter Lake Park to play at the playgrounds and do some challenges. He had tons of energy and was running back and forth in the house. Of course, on the 15 minutes drive to the park he managed to fall asleep. Just a couple minutes, but still.
We got to the park at 4:10. We parked on the west side, then walked to the spider web playground on the east side of the swamp, err, lake. I gave him challenges, like “Step on ten shadows” and “Turn something five times.” We did some shopping for the spider web and pretended to sleep under the web. We played around more and had a snack in the shade under the web. There was a small ‘Happy Purim!’ metal bucket that he picked up and was using as a shopping basket. There was also some sort of afterschool activities sort of class set up, and a bit later I realized the bucket we had taken was actually one of theirs. They had replaced it with another bucket. When I pointed this out, August at first said he really liked it and wanted to keep it, but then suddenly, he changed his mind and wanted to give it back. He got up and walked over on his own to where a couple of adults and a bunch of older kids were playing and he set it next to them. When they didn’t notice him or the bucket he tried a couple more times, moving it closer. He finally came back to me, happy, and said “I donated it.”
He then wanted to go over to the exercise equipment. He said “Exercise is a kind of playing, right?” We were over there for a short bit, then he needed to use the bathroom. We got on the bike and walked around the north end of the lake. He sang butt and dumb songs as we walked. He got off the bike to watch a big beetle on the ground and got it to walk over a piece of plastic and a leaf.
We made our way back to the car. The lot was now more than packed due to some sort of party in the park. We drove to the mall and parked, then went in and looked for shorts for me at Fox. I got two pairs, then we went right across to the Rebar stand. While in Fox he was excited to see a new Rebar video (commercial) that he liked on their big screen. We got the banana chocolate peanut butter one and sat at the counter and ate it. We then looked around the mall for one of those blow up cubes you can use on an airplane to fill up the foot space so that a kid has a flat area to sleep on. Ordered on on Friday from Amazon, but it is doubtful it will get here in time. Waiting for the elevator, he called to a couple “Hi Jack and Celeste!” It was not Jack and Celeste. The guy at the outdoors store suggested Ace. We’ll look there sometime, but seems like a long shot.
Walked around the whole mall looking at a few other stores that had stuff for children or luggage, but no luck. Headed home. On the way he explained all about a country of Tontilifon that is ‘only’ a couple overnight airplane rides away (6, he said, arguing that is a ‘couple’) that has really bad weather, and only he can live there. He was also singing some of the “Erasure” song we had heard earlier on his playlist. Not a song by Erasure, but a song called “Erasure” by Superchunk that’s pretty catchy: https://youtu.be/Ci-MGpBvUko
We got home at 7:30. We looked at all of the transplanted plants that Carly had finished up. We heard barking and it was the little dog from the neighbors that had crawled under the fence into the yard below ours. August looked through the fence at it and called “Hey dog, can you bark at me?…Good! I like barking!” I went in but they stayed out un
til 8. He was making a “concoction” of dirt for the plants.
Inside he had some spaghetti for dinner, then they checked on their date-left-in-water experiment. He then wanted some plain noodles to eat, saying they looked like aliens with gears. She took him up to a bath, and he bit his tongue. She did his bath and got him ready, and I said good night at 8:40. We switched a little after 9. I tried singing to him but he just sang “butt, poop, penis, pee, concrete…” I stopped and said he could just sing on his own for awhile. I was just lying there, falling asleep on his own, when after a couple minutes he got quiet, said some random word and made a noise, and rolled on his side and fell asleep, about 9:15 or so.